The Computer Thread

So it's built I'm proud to say that I did it all by myself. Well, my cousin helped a little and by a little I mean he did everything and I poked at things. Just gotta install windows and I'm good to go.

well I majorly fucked up and Im not sure whats wrong or what I did. ive got a win 7 disk and went to install it on my HDD. It worked and when it asked for a partition space I put 28 gigs cuz I thought partition meant the space dedicated to the OS or some shit. Of course that was wrong and when it finished I saw the HDD only had like 27 gigs. No probs I'll just boot to disk then run the installer again. When I got to the parition screen I deleted all the paritions and shit and now it refuses to install the OS.

"This computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disks controller is enabled in the bios menu" I have no idea what this means. Its happening on all my drives so the drives not bricked. It's seeing the drive in the SATA menu (specifically it says Serial ATA port not sure if that's relevant.)

The SATA thing is in AHTA or whatever it's called mode (not IDE or raid)

I'm not even sure what the problem is. Initial googling has a guy with the same error codes but he swapped to a different SATA port. My thing is seeing the port so that cant be the issue right? Why would deleting a partition fuck up a sata port? The hell did I do wrong?

It's been a while since I did a windows install so I could be wrong but I think it needs an unformatted drive to install to so if you just deleted the partitions but left the drive formatted that could potentially be the issue; If that's the case I'm not sure how to fix that without going through windows itself so I can't help you there.

I think you had the drive set up more or less right before though. I generally give the OS it's own partition then go in through the disk manager and set up a separate partition using the rest of the space on the drive. So you end up having drives C and whatever the other letter ends up as separate virtual drives located on the same physical drive.

Doing that generally makes it easier to fix OS issues and do reinstalls without losing any data.

Also, 28GB is kinda small for a W7 install partition, unless you regularly police the Windows Update patch backup files and restore points. Something more like 50 would be a better starting point, especially if you don't fiddle around with the virtual memory settings but let the OS handle it. (Mine's customized to only have a VM file on one separate partition, because I'm a little paranoid about "let Windows handle settings" in general. )

If I take a battery out of a computer (or, more specifically, if I take a laptop that has a dead battery out of its charge), will it eventually erase everything if it's not replaced for a little bit?

You won't lose anything that wouldn't be lost by turning the computer off.

Well, technically the main drive might deteriorate in a century or so, but that would happen whether it was powered up or not.

Shouldn't - hard disk drives and solid state drives don't require continous power to store memory (due to this, they are considered non-volatile memory), while the RAM will empty the moment it loses power (due to this, RAM is considered volatile memory).

edited 1st Jul '15 8:23:57 PM by Balmung

I'm trying to repurpose my old PC's main HDD into a bulk file-storage drive. (It's in an external USB-mounting case now.) How can I free up the space allocated to its old Windows files?

You'll probably have to reformat the partition, so make sure there's nothing on it you care about. If you just want to remove Windows and the other visible system files without wiping it, then you'll need to make sure to boot from a different drive, since you can't delete system files from the boot drive.

It's already booting from an internal drive; makes no difference whether the external one is plugged in or not as far as the OS goes. My issue is that I don't have the permissions to do anything with the old OS files.

Then you'll need to reformat the partition.

Well that's a pain, since I've already put some stuff on there, but I guess there's nothing for it.

I keep hearing a click from my computer-not a constant one, so I don't think it's the Click of Death-but it's like, once every ten, 15, 20, half hour. I don't keep track.

Alright. So it turns out that I somehow deleted a driver when I deleted the partition. At least that's what I'm understanding from what my cousin explained. So we had to get the mobo disk and dig through that to get it to work. But it worked!

I am now typing you from my newly built computer. I'm waiting for the other (at this point like the 30th) shoe to to drop and something else to totally fuck up but I've got steam D Ling a game to test out my new graphics card. It was quite the clusterfuck. We started at the very start of independence day (I'm attributing our luck to residual Will Smith Positivty Waves) and my cousin got out the door by the end credits.

So things I learned

1: Murphy's law is in full effect

2: Newegg lied to me

3: Drivers are satan

4: I will shell out the beer and pizza money to bribe my local computer guy BEFORE I completely fuck my machine up

5: Oh god I completely forgot about my bookmarks.

edited 4th Jul '15 6:58:16 PM by thatguythere47

I know Chrome lets you sync bookmarks, which came in handy when I built my PC from scratch. Dunno about Firefox.

If you're willing to set up a Firefox account, you can synchronize bookmarks, extensions and themes by signing in on the new machine's installation of Firefox with the account in question.

That feel when you go from not being able to run a game to running it on ultra at 100 FPS

Researchers build first working memcomputer prototype: "A combined team of researchers from the University of California and Politecnico di Torino in Italy has built, for the first time, a working memory-crunching computer (memcomputer) prototype. It is capable, the team reports in their paper published in the journal Science Advances, of solving the NP-complete version of the subset sum problem."

Genetic data storage approaching crisis point, growing faster than YouTube: " One of the problems of the big data phenomenon is figuring out how to provide enough storage for the mind-bogglingly huge data sets being generated by scientists, researchers, governments, and private companies every day.

The thing is, we’re making this particular dilemma worse all the time, because we’re creating and capturing more raw data than ever before. A study in 2013 found that 90 percent of all the data in the world had been generated in the preceding two years alone, creating huge logistical challenges for those whose job it is to make sure that this tidal wave of information is properly preserved for current and future purposes.

So who’s the biggest culprit when it comes to generating untold amounts of data? If you guessed You Tube, you’re right. With people uploading some 300 hours of video to the service every single minute, it generates about 100 petabytes of data per year (ie. 100,000 terabytes, if that helps). Luckily, Google’s not exactly short of a buck, so it’s presumably got the resources to deal with the flood.

But data generators in other areas might not be so well prepared. A new study by researchers at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the US says that the field of genomics is the fastest-growing data generator in the world today, with the quantity of genetic data being produced on a daily basis doubling every seven months at the current rate."

Turing Robotics prepares an unbreakable, unhackable, waterproof phone: "Those of you in the market for the very best that smartphone manufacturers can offer will want to take a long look at the new Turing Phone. Its makers are promising groundbreaking levels of security and strength (to protect against both hackers and drops), and it's built from a special liquid metal alloy called liquidmorphium that's stronger than titanium and steel. Pre-orders start at the end of the month."

We are in a world of science fiction....

T-1000 Anyone?

And the NSA is building a huge fortress in the Utah desert to store it's data trove, there are underground data servers for corporate clients...

...as Sf Debris said it "we are large bald squirrels burying our acorns"...

Curved 34" monitor coming.

21:9 aspect ratio, 3440x1440, 9 watt speakers, a $1200 price tag.

That costs more than my 40" 4K TV.

Anyone else getting random crashes with Firefox?